THE dream of regenerating damaged nerves so that people paralysed by spinal injuries can walk again has come a step closer.
Many factors conspire to prevent nerves regrowing after injury, including thick scar tissue that forms around the damaged area, preventing new nerve tissue from pushing through. “It’s like being in the jungle—you need a machete to make way,” says neuroscientist Lars Olson of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.
Now Elizabeth Bradbury of King’s College London and her colleagues have found such a machete—an enzyme from bacteria that can make severed nerves regrow in rats.
The researchers first…
